Create a text file for download on-the-fly

Check out this SO question's accepted solution. Substitute your own filename for basename($File) and change filesize($File) to strlen($your_string). (You may want to use mb_strlen just in case the string contains multibyte characters.)

Use below code to generate files on fly..

<? //Generate text file on the fly

   header("Content-type: text/plain");
   header("Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=savethis.txt");

   // do your Db stuff here to get the content into $content
   print "This is some text...\n";
   print $content;
 ?>

No need to store it anywhere. Just output the content with the appropriate content type.

<?php
    header('Content-type: text/plain');
?>Hello, world.

Add content-disposition if you wish to trigger a download prompt.

header('Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="default-filename.txt"');